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Friday, September 01, 2006

George Lucas Disease Is Spreading.

First Ted Turner tried to colorize numerous black & white films.

Then George Lucas redid the original Star Wars trilogy with modern computer graphics. I can accept he wanted to clean up the special effects (FX). I can accept he wanted add in more elements to a scene that he simply couldn't do at the time. Yet George didn't trust his instincts and had Han Solo react to someone shooting him in the cantina. HAN SHOT FIRST and for a good reason. Han Solo was an amoralistic space pirate! The audience needs to be queasy at first and wonder if this guy will sell out our heroes at his earliest convenience.

The team (headed by 18-year Trek design vet Michael Okuda, no mere hired gun)says it took a WWGRD approach, imagining how Gene Roddenberry would'veapproached the show's design and effects if he'd had access to contemporarytechnologies. Apparently, we'll see starbases teeming with people, shimmeringly"realistic" alien landscapes with moving clouds and glittering water surfaces.

Is anyone else tired of old works being "updated" to suit modern tastes? Can't a piece of cultural art be left alone? How far do we take this trend? Most of the women in Peter Paul Ruebens' paintings are rather fat for modern tastes. Should someone hire a new painter to skinny them up? (Perhaps the phrase should be 'skinny them down' in this case.) How about we just paint Paris Hilton or a skeletor Nicole Ritchie onto Ruebens' canvas? I feel some of Mozart's pieces are rather dull. Can I add a electric guitar and booming drumset to his work?

I'm willing to accept things in their context. I'm tired of revisionist histories and updating for "modern" tastes. The fun of some things is accepting them for what they are. In this case part of the charm of Star Trek was the cheap and cheesy special effects. It was a product of the 1960s and as an audience we shouldn't force modern production values and styles onto something 40 years old. It is what it is. Let it be.